Are You Growing Apart From Your Notebook?

Tech.pinions’ Ben Bajarin says he’s got the sense that he’s growing apart from his trusty MacBook, which is causing him mixed feelings of gratitude, sorrow, and an understanding that it is for the better. Bajarin says his relationship with notebooks peaked in 2011 with the 13-inch Macbook Air refresh which I at the time considered the perfect notebook for him. However, of late they’ve been been growing apart, and the iPad is the culprit.

Citing the late Steve Jobs’s comment at the original iPad launch that “the iPad is more intimate than a notebook, and more capable than a smartphone,” Bajarin says that nicely captures every bit of he and his notebook are growing apart, and why he thinks tablet computers will develop deeper connections with consumers than the desktop or notebook ever could. Specifically designed to be used 8-12 inches from our bodies tablets (and smartphones) are intrinsically more intimate and thus will yield fundamentally different emotional connections with those who use them than arms-length (or at minimum laptop) proximity PCs.

I’ve also been noticing this phenomenon to some degree, although with less enthusiasm than Tim Bajarin. I’m using my iPad more and more, but I still consider it a second-rate computing environment compared with my MacBook. I expect that I’ll be using both for the foreseeable future, although I expect continued convergence.